American Gods: Neil Gaiman on the “slightly hysterical” news coverage of season 2

Neil Gaiman, the author of the American Gods book who has also been working as an executive producer on the Starz TV show adaptation, has been chatting about the “slightly hysterical tenor” of some of the online reporting around season 2’s behind-the-scenes issues.

Bryan Fuller and Michael Green were the American Gods co-showrunners for season 1, but they departed the project during the development of season 2 with Jesse Alexander and Neil Gaiman becoming co-showrunners instead.

Now, chatting to Collider, Gaiman has been chatting about some of the press coverage that surrounded this showrunner switch.

This was the question from Collider’s Christina Radish: “This show has been through two showrunners, and the season finale aired in 2017. Is it a relief to actually be here, with new episodes, or did you believe that you would always get to this point?”

And this was Gaiman’s response:

“Yeah. It was weirder for me to read some of the stuff online that said, “Oh, my god, American Gods, behind the scenes, is all falling apart.” I was going, “But they just shot four episodes, and everything is fine. They’re doing some re-shoots, but they’re doing less re-shoots than they did in Season 1. I was going, “I don’t think this is news.”

“Then, I was reading Steven Bochco’s biography on the tube, going into work on Good Omens, every morning, and learning about what went down on Hill Street Blues, and then on NYPD Blue. That was worse, by a factor of thousands, than anything that happened on American Gods. A showrunner came, and a showrunner left. That’s not even an unusual thing.

“Given the slightly hysterical tenor of some of the reporting, and naming no names, but the Hollywood Reporter should have been ashamed of themselves, the weirdest thing for me was putting out a thing on Twitter on Season 2, and having a bunch of people go, “We thought this was cancelled.” No, it’s not cancelled. In its own mad way, it’s on schedule. It’s not the fastest show to make. It’s big and it’s complicated. I’m sure that Season 3 will be a while, as well. The waiting is a pain in the ass.”

UK viewers can watch American Gods season 2 on Amazon Prime, with new episodes arriving weekly. The US network is Starz.

We’ll keep you posted as we hear more interesting tidbits about the show…